ఎపిలాగ్: బైబిల్ ఇజ్రాయెల్ భవిష్యత్తు

EPILOGUE

The Future of Biblical Israel Yehud remained in the hands of the Persians for two centuries, until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. It then was incorporated into the empires established by Alexander’s successors, first that of the Ptolemies of Egypt, then that of the Seleucids of Syria. For more than 150 years after Alexander’s conquest the priestly leaders of the province now known as Judea maintained the customs and observed the laws that had first been formulated in the time of King Josiah and that had been further codified and refined in the exilic and post-exilic periods. Indeed, it is from the Hellenistic period, around 300 BCE, that we gain the first extensive description of biblical laws and customs from an outside observer. The Greek writer Hecataeus of Abdera, who traveled to the Near East not long after the death of Alexander, provides a glimpse of a stage of the Jewish tradition in which the prestige of the priesthood and the power of Deuteronomy’s social legislation had completely overshadowed the tradition of the monarchy. Speaking of the laws established by “a man named Moses, outstanding for both his wisdom and his courage,” Hecataeus noted: He picked out men of most refinement and with the greatest ability to head the entire nation, and appointed them priests; and he ordained that they should occupy themselves with the temple and the honors and sacrifices offered to their God. These same men he appointed to be judges in all major disputes, and entrusted them to the guardianship of the laws and customs. For this reason, the Jews never have a king. The Judeans, or Jews, became known throughout the Mediterranean as a community with a unique devotion to their God. At its heart were not only the shared law codes and rules of sacrifice, but the saga of national history that began with the call of Abraham in distant Ur and ended with the restoration of the Temple community by Ezra and Nehemiah in the post-exilic period. With the abandonment of the monarchy and the scattering of Jews throughout the Greco- Roman world, the sacred text of the Hebrew Bible was gradually translated into

Greek in the third and second centuries BCE and became the chief source of community identity and guidance for all those members of the house of Israel who lived beyond the immediate vicinity of the Temple of Jerusalem. Its saga of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land offered a shared vision of solidarity and hope for every individual in the community—in a way that royal or heroic mythologies could not. Dramatic changes would occur in the confrontation of the priestly leadership of Judea with Hellenistic culture and religion in the second century BCE. The Maccabees’ radical movement of resistance—in many ways reminiscent in ideology of the Deuteronomistic movement of the days of Josiah—succeeded in conquering a great part of the traditional land of Israel and enforcing the Law on its inhabitants. Yet the greatest power of the Bible would not be as a guide to military conquest or political triumphs, intended only to boost the fortunes of a particular ruler or dynasty. In the first century BCE, as the Hasmonean kings, of the Maccabean lineage, eventually declined into dynastic squabbling and the Roman client-king Herod took power in Judea, the Bible emerged as the uniting force and scriptural heart of a hard-pressed community. The stories of liberation and Joshua’s conquest gave special emotional power to the popular movements of resistance against local tyrants and Roman overlords throughout the first century BCE and the first and second centuries CE. Nowhere else in the ancient world had such a powerful, shared saga been crafted: the Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example; Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor a practical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both, providing a narrative framework in which every Jew could identify both family and national history. In short, the saga of Israel that had first crystallized in the time of Josiah became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community. With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the rise of Christianity, the independent power of the Bible as a formative constitution—not just a brilliant work of literature or a collection of ancient law and wisdom—proved itself. It was the basis for ever-expanding elaboration in the Mishnah and Talmud of Rabbinic Judaism and was recognized as the “Old Testament” of formative Christianity. The consciousness of spiritual descent from Abraham and the common experience of the Exodus from bondage became a shared mindset for ever-growing networks of communities throughout the Roman empire and the Mediterranean world. The

hope of future redemption, though no longer attached to the extinguished earthly dynasty of David, was kept alive in Judaism’s prophetic and messianic expectations, and in Christianity’s belief that Jesus belonged to the Davidic line. The poignant death of the would-be messiah Josiah so many centuries before had set the pattern that would survive throughout history. The Hebrew Bible would offer an unparalleled source of solidarity and identity to countless communities in the centuries that followed. The details of its stories, drawn from a treasury of ancient memories, fragmentary histories, and rewritten legends, possessed power not as an objective chronicle of events in a tiny land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean but as a timeless expression of what a people’s divine destiny might be. Just as the subjects of Charlemagne paid homage to him as a new, conquering David—and the followers of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman saw in him the wisdom of Solomon—other communities in very different cultural contexts would identify their own struggles with the struggles of biblical Israel. Medieval European peasant communities rose up in apocalyptic rebellions with the images and heroes of the Hebrew Bible as their battle banners. The Puritan settlers of New England went so far in imagining themselves as Israelites wandering in the wilderness that they recreated the Promised Land—with its Salem, Hebron, Goshen, and New Canaan—in their newfound meadows and woods. And none of them doubted that the biblical epic was true. It was only when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life that theologians and biblical scholars began to demand of it something that it was not. From the eighteenth century, in the Enlightenment quest for thoroughly accurate, verifiable history, the historical factuality of the Bible became—as it remains—a matter of bitter debate. Realizing that a seven-day creation and spontaneous miracles could not be satisfactorily explained by science and reason, the scholars began to pick and choose what they found to be “historical” in the Bible and what they did not. Theories arose about the various sources contained in the text of the Bible, and archaeologists argued over the evidence that proved or disproved the historical reliability of a given biblical passage. Yet the Bible’s integrity and, in fact, its historicity, do not depend on dutiful historical “proof” of any of its particular events or personalities, such as the parting of the Red Sea, the trumpet blasts that toppled the walls of Jericho, or David’s slaying of Goliath with a single shot of his sling. The power of the biblical saga stems from its being a compelling and coherent narrative expression of the timeless themes of a people’s liberation, continuing resistance to oppression, and quest for

social equality. It eloquently expresses the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive. In specific historical terms, we now know that the Bible’s epic saga first emerged as a response to the pressures, difficulties, challenges, and hopes faced by the people of the tiny kingdom of Judah in the decades before its destruction and by the even tinier Temple community in Jerusalem in the post-exilic period. Indeed, archaeology’s greatest contribution to our understanding of the Bible may be the realization that such small, relatively poor, and remote societies as late monarchic Judah and post-exilic Yehud could have produced the main outlines of this enduring epic in such a short period of time. Such a realization is crucial, for it is only when we recognize when and why the ideas, images, and events described in the Bible came to be so skillfully woven together that we can at last begin to appreciate the true genius and continuing power of this single most influential literary and spiritual creation in the history of humanity.